No Man’s Sky base-building update this week

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Hello Games have announced a major update for No Man’s Sky [official site], to be released this week. Called the Foundation Update perhaps for Asimovian reasons, but mainly because it adds “the foundations of base building, and also because this is putting in place a foundation for things to come”, it apparently won’t be the biggest update for the game, but it’ll certainly be the biggest one yet.

Since the game’s release, Hello Games acknowledge that they “have been quiet”, but say they’ve been listening to the commentary around the game:

The discussion around No Man’s Sky since release has been intense and dramatic. We have been quiet, but we are listening and focusing on improving the game that our team loves and feels so passionately about.

Positive or negative feedback, you have been heard and that will truly help to make this a better game for everyone.

This update will be the first small step in a longer journey. We hope you can join us.

We don’t have an exact date for the Foundation update. The post says “this week”, which seems an odd thing to write on a Friday to me, but might mean either in the next seven days or before Monday. It’s soon though. A lot sooner than I expected to be building bases on my lovely planet with the Tizer ocean.

That’s the last place I saw in my playthrough, a beautiful planet with a red sea and a moon almost as big as the sky. I enjoyed the time I spent with the game but when we discussed it shortly after release, I reckoned I might never go back. A silly statement, really, because the promise of new things has me reinstalling instantly. I might not like how grindy the game became, the way I played it, but I love sightseeing in virtual worlds, and No Man’s Sky, for all the faults I see in it, is a top notch bit of sci-fi tourism.

And The Builder said, ‘If the foundation is weak, do you wail and gnash your teeth? Do you ask it to repour itself? Nay, you tear it down and begin anew. So shall it be with all My Children, whether they be Stone or Flesh.’

They are just looking to poach few more sales in the run up to Xmas, banking on the fact that most of the negative backlash has died down.
They really do not deserve more sales until they have proven their effort to make it a better game. If even then.

Tbh I think it’s more of them trying to slowly improve the game for existing users rather than appealing to people who didn’t already buy it. They’re trying to salvage their reputation, I think their profits were fine from the game’s launch.

Which is fine by me. NMS was apparently released in sort of a stealth Early Access…

If they believe they ought to keep developing the game (it would be nice if they did, though I personally do not expect nor require them to), they should at least have enough resources to do so. And if they want to make another game that sells a lot, they’ll probably have to.

You are exactly right. Because it is absolutely telling that they have made this announcement on the day the game has gone on sale on steam and gog.
If they had made this announcement with no discount, they know they would make zero new sales. With a 40% discount, they might make a dozen new sales or so.
Then they can add their “foundations of base building” (the basic start of base building? Really?), and take their new hundred quid, and back off to the pub they will go.

Of all the things wrong with this terrible and awful game, Hello Games announces that they do listen to our criticism, but will really ignore all its problems and our criticism….so, they’ll add base building instead.

If that’s how they process criticism no wonder this game was so bad in the first place. Internal analysis must’ve been missing badly during development.

Yeah, of the things that are wrong with nms, lack of base building isn’t one of them. For the record I’ve enjoyed it despite some of the really bad design choices like the flight model, inventory, fanfare every time you pick up a pencil, stuff like that.

I will play it again in the future, probably stuffed with the 3rd party mods that actually fix this stuff

I’ve clocked about 20 hrs with the game and have run out of patience but i’ll eagerly install this to see what has improved.

My impatience was not with the lack of bases, but with the core grind mechanic. It’s just cookie clicker in space. I can’t imagine they’d change something that central to the game mechanics, regardless what feedback they claim they’ve heard.

Additionally, everything wrong with the game as it stands, and everything amiss in their community management indicates the game’s problem is not its design but is at a staff and management level, which can’t receive an update so easily.

Yesssssss this guy right here. I enjoyed my time with it. I just hope they improve the proc-gen so that the exploration is more varied. It has the potential for some amazing moments no other game can provide.

Agreed. I bought the game recently, and have honestly been enjoying it a lot. It’s certainly not without its flaws, but it’s nowhere near the level of ‘worse than Hitler and Sean Murray is Space Judas’ that the Angry Internet Men seem to have tried to drill into anybody with an ear to spare.

It’s a fine game, and I’m really glad Hello Games seem to have rode out the wave of internet bile.

Indeed, I found (and still find) the overzealous backlash against the game pretty overblown. Then again, I never expected anything more than a pretty sci-fi novel-cover space tourism exploration simulator with some side grinding/shooting/deformation aspects on the side. And, for what it is, I love it and am happy with the purchase. It’s a game I go back to often to relax after a long and/or stressful day and just look at lovely majestic sci-fi scenery and tickle my inspiration bone.

This argument seems fair if you make certain assumptions about the obligation that a developer (or artist of any kind) has to 9/10 of their customers, or any of their customers at all. If you go to a movie, watch a play, buy an album or choose to patronize any form of entertainment or art you do so with the explicit knowledge that it might have gone wrong somehow, compromises or mistakes made, or that even if everything did go right you might just fucking hate it.

I’m also going to assume that you’re not suggesting that 9/10 customers are having technical issues to the point they can’t even load or play the version of the game as it exists, which would be a legitimate controversy. I acknowledge the random framerate issues and frustrating quality scaling. The game admittedly doesn’t run as smooth as it seems it should (and often does), and these are legitimate criticisms one might have been expected to be addressed earlier. That’s not what the majority of frustration towards this game has been about.

So if the grievances that these 9/10 customers might have are not technical, and are instead a displeasure or disappointment with the [preliminary] product, what is your expectation about how those grievances be resolved? What if they were/are never resolved? To what extent have you been harmed, and if so how does this harm differ from the other occasions when games/music/film/art/etc. let some or all paying customers down?

Also, the notion that ‘100 days of radio-silence’ is unprecedented makes me think you just started playing games in the last 36 months, unless I’m missing something about the 2000s and 90s where developers painstakingly worked with their customers to adjust every aspect that frustrated or disappointed them.

The OP was saying “it’s nowhere near as bad” as the unprecedented flood of outrage from people who were actually angry YouTube guys. You call this a “narrative,” suggesting a concerted message control on the part of anyone who takes this position either because they are passing propaganda or because they are already brainwashed by it. You cite two streamers who seem to fit into this ‘9/10’ framework who reflect on the subject reasonably and reach the same conclusion everybody who plays video games makes countless times with countless other titles: ‘Whoa, that sucked and I don’t want to waste any more of my time not liking it.’ Fine, they’re not angry YouTube guys. That says absolutely nothing about all the people who were angry YouTube guys. And it says nothing about whether their opinion should have any bearing on the direction of the game for those who haven’t said they’ll “never play it again.”

Think about all the games/etc. you hate, all the Episode One’s and Batman v. Superman’s, all the games that were simply worse at release, the Final Fantasy XIV 1.0s, vanilla Civ Vs, all the previews and preorders. When have you ever crusaded on behalf of customers? When have you ever used your perceived faults as a measure of whether that developer or company should continue to do business or be penalized for some kind of exceptionally dishonest practices? (How often have video game companies been investigated for false advertising? Has it ever happened before, and is it even merited in this instance?) And ultimately, what are the consequences of making games mere products that maximize satisfaction from a general user base rather than peculiar experiments that might not be performed anywhere else?

There may be an argument to be made about myself or others who do enjoy the game and continue to play it, that we are overcompensating and compromising more than we might with other games in regards to what really does become disappointing gameplay given contemporary expectations. But that attitude didn’t come out of nowhere. If there is any narrative, it’s the actually unprecedented outrage and radical regard for consumer ‘rights’ that have surrounded this game and its developers since release. If people who compliment the game are the least bit delusional, it is in reaction to the absolutely hysterical position that most people have taken towards the game. Not because grievances aren’t legitimate, or that a majority of people who played the game agree with them, but that these grievances have never been carried through public space at the end of a pitch fork like they have with No Man’s Sky.

Certainly you’re capable of putting your grievances in context and realizing it’s no grounds for accusing the allegedly 1/10 people who do like this game of having an agenda.

The story of No Man’s Sky is just so common – it’s just a game some people find disappointing. It seems increasingly clear to me that the highly developed social media we now have is prone to producing emotionally intense moments of group think as a kind of ‘network effect’. Movies had the Ghostbusters remake. Games have No Man’s Sky.

Go ahead, you may like it. I certainly did for the first few hours when I thought I was just scratching the surface. It doesn’t help that the inventory system and materials grind makes you feel like you should be getting paid as if you’ve got some depressing, sub minimal wage, zero-hour contract night shift job whilst plucking up the courage to commit suicide.

I’m not remotely annoyed about No Man’s Sky. I haven’t bought it. I don’t think they were as deceptive as people say they were. Hopefully it will eventually turn into a game that I would want to play. If that happens, great, I’ll buy it. If not, I don’t really mind.

I’m happy they sold a lot of copies. I think people’s negative reactions were hugely over the top, but then there’s a weird sense of entitlement permeating through the gaming community that seems to get worse year by year.

I’ve played it and all I’ve left with is the impression of a small studio caught in massive and sudden interest, publicity and Sony marketing money. They might have been developing a small game of gathering and crafting and going to planets, and then all this hype begins to build up.

Maybe they (or Sean Murray) began to feel like rock stars, maybe they thought they can implement everything he said in all those interviews, and only when it was too late they realized that no, nope. But they couldn’t stop (or didn’t want to, anymore) the train, maybe hoping that they could patch everything in later and people would be understanding etc. etc.

I’m a lot more angry about some bullshit politicians wanting to spend 80M€ public money to build a Guggenheim the ass-end of Europe…

I don’t buy the ‘small indie studio caught up in the hype’ argument. At any point the devs could’ve easily clarified what is/isn’t in the game and what sort of experience it actually would be. But instead they bought first class tickets on the hype train and rode it all the way to releasing an unfinished product and banking the pre-order dollars.

True, they must have figured that NMS isn’t going to be what people expect, though it is debatable that they decided to sacrifice their professional reputation in exchange for more money.

People don’t always choose the most rational way of doing things. And a few months is no time at all to dither about such things and before you realize the release date is upon you and you can’t think of anything you can say to appease anyone, after all those promises… So you release and keep the cash and either weather the storm and/or hope to fix things later on.

I’ve played it and enjoyed it, mostly because I wanted a sci-fi walking simulator with nice landscapes and that’s what I got. I can understand people who expected something else being disappointed, but I think the outrage has more to do with it not being what a “full-price game” is supposed to be in the minds of the sort of people who talk about “full-price games”.

This could be a good thing to tweak, honestly. People have speculated that ‘nicer’ worlds are less common in the first solar systems you have access to, and become more common as you travel to the other kinds you have to upgrade your warp drive for. Honestly, I think it’s about the same. You will more often than not be dissatisfied with a planet because it is either barren, so hazardous as to waste your time dealing with it, or simply a combination of variables that don’t peak your interest. It’s an aesthetic labyrinth whose novelty depends very much on this randomization, but also runs the risk of never generating the right combination to appeal to many of the people who are having a hard time enjoying it in the first place.

All I can say is that I’ve found many places that I love, and even still had emergent moments of discovery in places I wouldn’t choose to go back to. It’s a labyrinth, but one that nobody else can help you navigate, and one you might never traverse. Because I’ve found satisfaction in the game, that seems like a problem and one that I hope they address. Make it easier to scan nearby star systems so it’s not such a gamble every time you descend to a planet after having spent 3-4 minutes flying there. Make it easier to tag the details of planets for other people (if the current propensity for bumping into other players isn’t unintended). Make it possible for other people to visit those nice planets using portals or wormholes or something.

Again, I love the sense of discovery, but once it’s been found I’d like a more substantial way of sharing that discovery.

the idea is awesome of random planets but after a few dozen warpdrives its all pretty much the same, specially the buildings , the space stations the aliens u meet there all just the same , and the space craft all to much of what we have seen before , they should add ring planets , plantes with civilization on them , i must have traveled about 200,000 light years and every planets building all looked like they were build with the same person lol which is true but it needs more variety it needs more things to do other than just farm materials when u get on a planet also ,

To claim that the complaints for NMS were mostly due to entitlement is factually wrong. I mean, if you haven’t played the game and don’t know at least look up some information on the subject without speaking out of your ass on it. There were numerous things promised and hinted at that are nowhere to be found in the game at all.

I’ll gladly admit the hype of the game was its major downfall, but let’s not pretend like there aren’t serious issues with how this game was developed and marketed to gamers. Yes, a lot of that was due to journalism hype, but they rode that hype to sales instead of bringing peoples’ expectations down to reality on top of flat out misleading people.

No. I have to disagree with you there. Every feature listed in the Amazon product description was in the initial release. Everything. And there was no mention of any multiplayer. None. So, don’t complain about it not being in the game because you knew it wouldn’t be in the game when you blindly preordered it.

Next time watch some extended livestreams on twitch.tv to see if it suits you.

Well the hype was it’s the game to end all space games so people bought in the hype, that’s why they seemed particularly entitled to get a better game than they got.
I quite notice the opposite trend as people seem to be content with broken releases that get fixed in several months or never and such things.

I dunno… it certainly didn’t look, feel or play like we’d seen in the ‘live’ demo’s.

It’s almost, but not quite like those video game adverts with the ‘not in game footage’ caveat quickly flashed along the bottom of the screen.

It’s very difficult to describe it’s faults unless you’ve played the game, although if you picked it up today, your expectations would be so low that you’d probably think it was OK, at least for the first few hours.

It’s rendered at x720, has pop-in so bad that they hobbled the flight model to prevent you crashing into something that exists but hasn’t been drawn yet. Not to mention some really stupid grind mechanics, like the launch thruster thing that constantly needs refuelling just to ‘persuade’ you to do a little bit of exploring on foot.

Thing is… if this game had a love child with Elite: Dangerous, it would actually be very good.

After wasting 40-odd sheets on it, the only NMS story I’d really want to follow is the one about Hello/Sony being done for false advertising. That or them finding a charity to donate a substantial chunk of their profits to.

I don’t feel like it’s hyperbole to say that I’ve played more fully realised games that were free or a tiny fraction of the cost of NMS. It was a puddle as wide as an ocean and a buggy, incomplete, grossly overpriced tech demo.

I hope the developers are alright. They’ve been getting a lot of internet-hate, even more than is usual for the internet, and I can understand why they’ve been so quiet (I’m not referring to RPS btw, you’ve been quite even-handed in your evaluation and opinions of the game, even when expressing disappointment).

No, they posted a few comments specifically to misdirect discussion of the game’s most glaringly absent features, then shut down all communication immediately after launch. This is the environment that developed the anger, hatred, and finally derision. They were proactive in this, not reactive.

I don’t even want to defend them, but to be honest, what could they have said to make it better? I can’t think of anything that would have made it better. When such enormous hate starts, it doesn’t go away by saying a few things, usually this too then is used against the target.

No. Just no. The only things that “developed” anger, hatred and derision were immature twats with no sense of proportion or decency who think those kinds of emotions are appropriate when faced with a situation that for most should engender mild disappointment at best.

If the purchase price was a significant chunk of your disposable income, or deep sacrifice was required, and you could derive no satisfaction whatsoever from the game as delivered, then I could maybe understand something approaching anger. But the majority of the stampy shouty twisted-face babies pouring their bile out on the Internet are not in that situation. Even if you think that Hello deliberately “lied”, which requires a lack of both charity and understanding of human nature and games development, there is no way that “hatred” is justified.

That is the “entitlement” – not the disappointment, which is fair, but the belief that disappointment entitles one to emote in a pathetic public display of juvenile rage.

You realise that forty sheets can be quite a lot of money for some people, particularly youngsters, or some parents who may have bought the game for their children.

I remember over twenty years ago buying ‘The Terminator’ for my Sega Megadrive thinking it was Alien 3. I finished the game in twenty minutes; it looked good, but forty pounds (a lot of money back then) for a twenty minute game? It was a fucking rip off. Particularly when compared with Alien 3 which went on to be a classic.

If I’d paid as much for a meal in a restaurant and the food was as bad as NMS I wouldn’t have paid. If I’d bought a physical product for the same price and it was as shit as NMS I would have returned it for a refund.

Sure, it’s not like I’ve just spent twenty grand on a brand new car and then realised I’d bought a rusted, knacked out Vauxhall Shove-it, but forty quid isn’t throwaway money.

So, don’t spend it blind? If you don’t like sushi but you ran into a Japanese resturant, ordered a £40 meal that you had no idea what it was and they brought you out a plate of sushi, you have no business not paying.

Not sure how basebuilding works in a game where you travel around in a linear fashion.
Maybe the base lies in a hyperspace pocket you’d access from anywhere?
It would have to show up permanently marked in-system since there’s no way of navigation and well there’s no navigation on the galaxy map either – I never found places I visited again.
Won’t make me go back and turn my opinion, sorry to say.

Somewhat similar to my thoughts on reading that they’re actually doing the bases thing, either it’s going to require some quite notable changes to the game both in terms of mechanics and overall design, or it’ll be nothing of consequence and ‘base building’ will constitute farting out a little disposable doodah wherever you land on a planet that gives a few bonuses, and that you never think of (or go near, because they don’t change mapping/navigation to make it easy to return to places) again because you’re dumping one out on virtually every planet you land on.
But I guess if it gives you another thing to keep gathering resources to keep building all the time it’d be totally what the game needed, right?

I was never one of the people running to try and sue them, or get my money back, but this is probably my most disappointing release of 2016.

What is the point of base building, when the only thing approaching a formal objective the game even has, is to move to the centre of the galaxy? And supposing you could access it from anywhere, would it really change anything about this game, and the fundamentally tedious gameplay loop?

I put about 20 hours into it, desperately trying to find something to latch onto, because I had been so hyped about it pre-release. I eventually just gave up. The combat felt bad, the mining was dull, and the constant management of your spacesuit and various other resource-sinks was the worst.

The planets could occasionally be sorta nice looking, but every single one just felt lifeless and empty. Animals exhibited no AI and usually looked like bodged together monstrosities. You’d get the same 6-7 building types on every planet, offering the same terrible “puzzles”, and the same meaningless conversations with aliens.

And then on top of all of this, Hello Games haven’t communicated with their customers in the slightest since it came out, presumably because they were shell-shocked by the reaction. They vastly over-promised, and horribly under-delivered.

i like empyrion but as far as i know it has yet to have things like procedural planets or galaxies. Also the planet are ridiculously tiny and you can’t get to the poles. I think eventually the game has ambition to be big and procedural but we’re really not there yet.

Thank you. Empyrion and No Man’s Sky are completely different games and while NMS could benefit from some of the progression and peril in Empyrion, the same could be said about Empyrion benefiting from the procedural generation and environmental variety of NMS. Also, the jet pack is way better in NMS.

I have both games and look forward to what Empyrion will become, but I prefer No Man’s Sky by far and this comparison only makes me anticipate base-building even more. But that’s just my preference, and again I don’t think they should be compared without expecting either game to become something it currently is not.

Base building? How about SHIP building. If the ships are procedurally generated, all the parts have and what not have to be there? Just build on that.

I don’t see the point of putting time and resources in to a base to only traverse several star systems away to see it’s existence eventually useless? At the moment it’s a chore to mine resources, save up finances to buy the biggest, baddest ship you can. There just needs to be diverse, maybe more risk adverse ways to make cash with some meaningful punishment for failure. Honestly, when your ships gets messed up and the system you in doesn’t have materials you need, so you mine hard, go to ships trying to find resources, f$&k me that just slams on the brakes in a very non-fun way.

Mining should be the beginning and eventually become optional. It’s far too much time of the core game loop. It should be something like the lowly survivor starts on their journey, crash-landed desperate to get back to civilisation and recoup. If you choose so long term, the easy but slow way to make money can be mining. Raiding freighter ships, installations, bounty runs, hauling freight, protection rackets, all that kind of stuff should be a thing. Why is each system populated by one race? Why don’t other races come in for some heated battle, trade with other.

I have dropped a lot of hours in to this game and I do love it a lot for the experience I got from it. I may have dropped 140 hours and then went in to some other games. I came back and I was appalled at it. I really, REALLY drank the koolaid, maybe choked on it a bit. That being said, I did have a great experience with it. I love exploration games.

I hope there is more to it then just a base to hole up in, land your ship, access to the market or whatever. Maybe it will have things like an armory or workshop, better weapon modification, build your own ships, hunt/herd/breed/farm creatures for resources.

If anything I hope Hello Games build on what they started, make it the best experience they can with some of those millions of dollars they made, and put the rest to R&D and make the next game something that gives them back the respect they’ve lost with a lot of people. Regardless of the BS, I don’t want to see Hello Games go down. I just want them to produce the titles they say they want to.

I think hello games did an exceptional job they created a good, fun, space game.
Yep I agree it got mundane/repetitive at times, if you ignored that, played it as it was built, you would of had a lot of fun!
I am glad to hello games they never gave up.
I played it quadruples more than dishonored 2 (D2= 30hrs) I loved d2 but just couldn’t be assed to go all around covering the whole maps again!…now that’s repetitive.
Staying in Silence is hello games best thing they could of done!
Yes, I uninstalled it, even though I loved it.
Space and time beat me.
I’m very happy to re install it now and await & see what inventive ideas they have for us in this well made, outside the box, creative, game.
Keep going! Hello Games :)

And exactly what difference would a different tactic (like not being silent) have made? People would’ve slammed their responses anyways, whatever they would have told the public. Just look at the responses to this article: HG announce updates, people slam that down.

I enjoyed my time with the game — I know some people did not. I also felt like I got my money’s worth. The repetition did get tedious eventually, and I stopped playing. While base-building will not be enough to draw me back, I’m hopeful that future updates will accomplish that, eventually.

Nice to see they are updating NMS. I have a faint hope that they keep doing this for some time and turn it into a masterpiece.
*sigh*
But they’ll never solve what makes NMS a (marvellous, but still) failure at its core. The game does not know what it wants to be. It never really chooses between being a space walking simulator with beautiful vistas and exploration, or being a survival space game in a procedural universe. And in the end, the grindy survival elements prevent the player from fully enjoying the trip. As if Hello Games was actually not too ambitious, but in fact too shy to really think a full flying and walking simulator with no other gameplay would work – because in the end, I feel like it’s what NMS should have been since the start.

In the end, it’s a shame. Not really for NMS itself, because after all they sold quite a lot of copies for an indie game. But it’s shame because we’ll never see a sequel, and if a game ever needed a sequel, it’s NMS. It reminds me a bit of the first Assassin’s Creed : a shell of a game that had good ideas but horrible gameplay and was boring as hell. And then we got Assassin’s Creed 2. But we’ll never see a No Man’s Sky 2 – or if we see it, it’ll be in a very different form, and not how it should be.
Just give me a space exploration game with barebone survival elements and old alien ruins to explore, a story to discover while travelling, and I’ll forgive you for everything, Hello Games.

You know, I never thought that the natural evolution of Starflight would be a walking low-profile market simulator. If they tightened the game a bit and focused more in the narrative (without the need of being over the top as Mass Effect games do) it would turn into a much better game. To me, as far as you can get from grinding, the better. There are many people who will ignore the story line and will mine, sell and buy forever, so grinding and comatose reaction gameplay should not be mandatory.

Getting rid of the stupid grind for resources and the horrendous inventory interface (which doesn’t even fit the screen properly) would definitely improve the game from ‘extremely shit’ to ‘pretty shit’.

At least to “pleasant”. I don’t agree on it being pretty shit, just being trapped in the modern tropes of gaming. You do more or less the same here than what you do in Skyrim, in Minecraft or whatever game that allows resource scavenging, crafting and has some kind of market: fill your inventory, craft things, sell them and empty your inventory, go again. I seriously want to kill all the reviewers that think that this is a good design practice. Oh, shit, I have the nerdy detective short story that I always wanted to write now shaped!

I will buy the game when it will reach the 10€ range, just to see what all the fuss was about. It will get there and I can wait.

But whatever the game quality, the scam was first class and I’d really love to read about how it all happened. Did Hello Games contact Sony or did Sony discover them? Who did the sales pitch and who made decisions and why? Who made those videos (no need to explain why)? Etc. etc.

Funnily enough, I fired up NMS for the first time yesterday for the first time in months, a few hours before the update was announced.
I’m currently playing with the God mod – basically makes everything free and you can hyperjump as far as you want. Also with the better water mod and the mountain mod.
I stay on a planet for a few minutes, have a look around, take some screenshots and then move on. And I fell in love with the idea of the game all over again.
This is all I wanted from the beginning, just me and a ship flying around exploring the galaxy without distraction.
The game is truly beautiful!
I feel if NMS was just released as an pure exploration game – without all the other game elements (with the exception of possibly trading for new ships) – it would have become a cult classic. Perhaps they felt forced or pressured to add gaming extra elements in – I don’t know.
Either way, going forward, I might just play it as an exploration game only. Maybe find a nice planet and build a little hermit hut and stay there for a while.
Either way, I think over time, this game will be remembered more fondly, after all the mainstream players have cleared off and when all who are left playing it is are the type of fans that enjoy this type of thing.

This.
If NMS had been a pure walkin/flying simulator, where the only goal aside from wandering around would have been to explore planets in order to find ruins of an old civilization, or any other vague but intriguing enough goal, it would have been an instant classic.

I was an outsider and only picked up the game based on watching streamers. Seemed like a fairly calm experience. I put 66 hours into the game and have enjoyed it so far. While I can understand the hate for those that followed development, I never followed development so my perspective has been different. Pretty big update. Hope there are more updates in the future.